I'll add to your list of issues:
* distracting me while I'm driving with a banner that blocks the bottom half of the screen, with a message written in small font, asking if a speed trap is still on the freeway. This is distracting and unexpected, leading me to take my eyes off the road to get a basic understanding of what the app needs, which starts with reading the text. Ironically, the font is small due to the inclusion of a "reminder" to only interact when it is safe.
* screen space co-opted by ads, promotions and reviews for local businesses.
“Continue straight for 2 miles”
“Continue straight for 3 miles”
“Continue straight for 5 miles”
……
Then at some point I have to wonder ok when exactly is my exit coming up. And I have to zoom out on the navigation to see oh I still have a few miles to go. The progress it shows is always based on whatever fractional random segment length they’ve got me on at the moment. So I can’t quickly tell that I’m halfway into that 20 mile section
I forgot to mention sometimes "Continue straight for 1 mile" causes me to begin my migration from left lane to right lane in anticipation of the exit, then she just says, "Continue straight for 3 miles" and I'm livid. (Not sure if this is widely understandable but I tend to speed and usually am in the left lane passing/speeding, while exits are generally on the right so I interpret "Continue straight for 1 mile" as I have an exit coming up).
No sane pilot would ever accept ads popping up on the controls in an airplane cockpit, so let's keep them away from a car's dashboard, too. The fewer distractions the better.
Which is, honestly, one of the least-annoying types of ads I get on a regular basis. Sometimes it's much easier to follow than a street name anyway!
I think that is entirely the point. Apple Maps added something similar around a year ago, where it now says "After this light, ___" or "Take the next ____", which is much easier to understand than giving a street name that you have never heard of. It gets you to look at the road more than at the map which is a bonus for safety.
Fast food restaurants and other major chains fit that bill reliably enough that you could automate adding them to directions. Telling drivers to take a right at, say, a local restaurant that may not have an obvious sign could easily be worse than relying on street signs.
Turn left where the Tastee-Freeze used to be. Hey Siri! How do I get to town from here?
And she said:
Well just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall
Go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway
Take a left at what's going to be the new sports center
And keep going until you hit the place where
They're thinking of building that drive-in bank
You can't miss it.
And I said: This must be the placeDisc: Googler but nowhere close to the products discussed here.
Maybe these ads are part of the reason every third stoplight I have to honk my horn because the guy ahead of me is dicking around on his phone after it turns green?
The absolutely blood boiling part about it is that Google will tell me that it's going to take me on an alternate route, unless I press "No" or "Cancel" or something on the phone within a few minutes. How am I supposed to get my phone and press cancel while driving? I realize some people may have their phone / Google Maps integrated with the car, or may use their phone while driving, but I don't. For me the phone is basically announcing "Hey, I'm gonna annoy you in a few minutes, okay?"
I use Google Maps by listening to the directions through a bluetooth speaker in my helmet so I rarely am ever actually looking at the screen. I absolutely hate how many times it will interrupt/announce absolutely useless information, or at times suddenly announce a route change for a 30 second faster route and it'll just sit there waiting for my input which I cannot provide in order to cancel.
You might find it less aggravating, dunno.
Plus, for longer trips paper maps are way better on a bike, since Google is really aggressive about what roads they hide. I've found way more fun roads to travel on after using this method. Plus, with a tank bag you always have your rain gear and other necessities with you. Only downside is they look ugly.
Last summer this had my blood boiling. I was part of some backed up traffic but I could already see my destination on the other side of a river, Google Maps saying ~25 minutes away. Suddenly it asks if I want to take an alternate to save 2 minutes. I look at the map and it looks like a pretty wild path to try to save 2 minutes over so I say no. About a minute later it asks again. I say no. This keeps repeating, with a different estimate between 1-4 minutes. I keep saying no. Finally I don't manage to hit the no button quick enough and it assumes I want to save the 2 minutes... so now every exit it starts saying "take the exit...". It was at about this point I thought to just turn the car volume off until I got over the bridge and turn it back on for the rest of the directions.
There was just something about how annoying it managed to be that set me off about it, it couldn't have been less helpful and more of a pain if it tried. Now whenever I hear that prompt that memory comes up. That and like you say the damn "you're on the fastest route". No shit, you'd go off your rocker if I wasn't why bother telling me.
Recently I was going through Chicago and a similar thing started happening during a heavy traffic period but this time rather than "there is a faster route" it was "stay on blah blah for the next <x> miles". Again constantly repeating. I got to thinking about it and I came to the conclusion Google Maps must have an issue where if you stay relatively still and there is any location drift when it snaps you back onto the road it considers it the same as if you had just went through an intersection and it should update you on what's next or going on. In the case of going over the bridge in Cincinnati that meant telling me about the ever so slightly shorter path I could use. In the case of going through Chicago that meant don't take any of the coming splits. Or at least that's the best logical reasoning I could come up with, either way I just muted my car again.
For some years I was using pebble smartwatch which would vibrate with the turn notification (and I could glance it quickly to verify if I wasn't wearing earpiece or couldn't hear it). In all of those described cases I can't interact with the phone. At some point Apple or Google decided to block the turn notifications from pinging over to my watch, so I had to exclusively wear earpiece to hear directions.
To tie in with the rest of the thread, Google Maps will automatically suggest whatever route it wants and since I cannot interact with the phone on this setup, it will just go with whatever it wants to do, which often leads me onto roads under construction and other potentially dangerous routes. No way to turn off this 'feature'.
This is an intended behavior to increase uptake of whatever project introduced alternate routes, and will be presented in the team's performance reviews as evidence of their success.
Finally, I didn't say it was "some crazy dangerous thing". You should mentally flag times when you are writing a reply and have to invent new, extreme, and non-representative language to characterize the position you are replying to. Likely, those will be times when, instead of actually replying, you are just babbling to no purpose. That said - taking your attention off of driving to interact with your phone is certainly sub-optimal from a safety point of view.
"you need to press a button in the next two minutes" isn't any more distracting than what you're already getting.
This way it doesn’t update the route with a ‘timesaving’ route or to an expensive toll route. It’s crazy I have to do this and far from ideal as I would like it to update if there really is a major timesaving route, eg if an accident occurs, but I don’t trust Google Maps now to not update now with a screen only navigation alert.
What it should do is alert me to this change with an audible alert and wait for me to actively approve this route change.
Google as an overall company seems to have jumped the shark some years ago and the slow decline is starting to become apparent through many of their products, search included.
[0] With the caveat that there's no doubt a massive backlog of missing backend data like bike lanes and public transport data that still needs to be filled in.
Recently though it decided to take me on an extremely annoying new route that has me going through a bunch of tiny seemingly abandoned towns with lots of backroads and even unpaved roads all to save less than 5 minutes.
Now I have to make absolute sure I select the proper route beforehand. But even when I do that it constantly nags me along the way that it has determined there is a faster route so I need to dismiss it. I can't trust it to not take me on some wild back road through a field.
I was on holiday in the UK a couple of years ago, down in south west, and it insisted on sending us down these really narrow, single-car-width country roads (with passing places). I grew up in the UK, and learned to drive on them, so no particular fuss with actually driving down them. The problem is they're "National Speed Limit" roads (60mph / 30mph in built up areas). They're just too narrow, and too twisty, to be able to come even close to it, let alone do it safely.
Unless there has been enough cars using Google Maps going down that road, within a recent enough time period so that it knows the road is currently slow, it'll send you down it assuming you're able to go at something approximating the limit. Sod the large road that's just a little bit further away and legitimately can be used at those speeds. It got almost farcical. I'd even attempt to persuade it otherwise, and part way through it would reroute and I'd still end up going down one.
google sent us on a fire road cut into the side of a cliff over a small stream. we really couldn't go more than 5 kph maximum and had to use a spotter several times to avoid going over the edge. when we encountered a car coming the other direction we all got out and tried to figure out how one of us was going to drive backwards until there was a turnout.
it took us 2 hours to to go about 5km.
Not a road though a field, it wanted me to use a muddy ploughed footpath in the actual field itself.
Wild back road through a field? Yes please, every time.
But you'll shave 30 seconds off your trip ... unless you miss the light, then it was a mistake.
The main problem is that a bunch of these route decisions really only make any sense at all if you are a very aggressive driver.
I've been running into this constantly. It seems like it has no allowance for the average number of seconds spent at a light, so it sends me routes cutting through town that end up being slower because of all the signals, when it could have just sent me up the freeway three more exits.
I've learned to be critical of the route and look before I leave.
One think that really messed things up is that route option state is pretty hidden. My wife was ranting at how stupid Google Maps was because my daughter was using Apple Maps in the drivers seat and Apple Maps was doing sane things and Google Maps was doing dumb things. Apparently this had gone on for weeks. Turns out somehow she had "avoid highways" selected and didn't realize it.
The app really does seem to get worse and worse though. I think it's trying to push me to switch to using voice commands but I'm too dumb to remember the incantations yet.
Encountered this on my last vacation.
> - ex: I don't need to be told to stay on just because an exit ramp has a disappearing lane
I've started to realize getting to some places is actually quite simple, but made to seem complicated by the constant Google instructions to "use the left 2 lanes to stay on [major road]", "use the right three lanes to stay on [major road]". Would help to relax if it was just "stay on [major road] for next 20 miles" instead of constant false indicators of a turn coming up.
I hate this so much, and they all do it (I guess not Apple, interesting...). I live on the West coast, US, so road trips for me are often 100s of miles on I5. But instead of knowing that I have 337 miles left on this highway, I instead know that it's 3.2 miles until the next time I'll not be exiting the freeway.
I’d rather it “stay on this road for 20 miles” then start giving me “exit in 1mi”, “exit in 1/4 mile”, “you’ve passed the last exit, next exit is yours!”.
My current theory is that this is an artifact of the eco-friendly route option. I think it avoids lights if there's otherwise no significant difference in predicted arrival. It can be extremely frustrating because it seems to dump me making a left turn onto busy roads when there's a light one block down. I know I end up spending more time trying to make that turn.
For example: turn right at the traffic lights after the next one vs “turn right in 500 meters.”
If you have the watch it will gently tap your wrist shortly before each turn, and it displays the turn in a very clear, uncluttered way on the watch screen, which you can clearly comprehend without needing to take your hand off the wheel. I find this is great in rental cars if you have no phone mount nor CarPlay and you want to avoid needing to interact with your phone while driving.
(Edited to add: I just went for a drive and paid more attention to how I use the watch with Maps, and I don't take my hand off the wheel if I'm just looking at the directions. Rotating it towards me quickly is enough to get the screen to wake. I have the Series 6 where the screen only dims and hides dynamic information when 'sleeping'. Maybe older watches where the screen actually turns off & on have a higher threshold before they wake?)
This seems like the kind of thing that's great if the map data is extremely accurate, but far worse than the older style if there's any chance of mis-counting lights. Even hitting a glitch once (e.g. it says 2 lights when it's really 3) could hurt trust in the app's navigation a lot.
Oh, trying to tap to take an alternate route on the map? Want to tap to add a gas station stop to your route? Sorry, the touch target is too close to your nav icon, but hey at least you can cycle through 3 different car styles endlessly. What a waste of resources.
While I don’t know that this is Waze’s fault, er, influence, I can’t help but be suspicious. I was on the Waze bandwagon years ago, but soon realized that Waze was increasingly becoming the algorithmic version of your Crazy Uncle Bob who always insists he “knows a shortcut” that involves going over three barely-maintained mountain roads and an unprotected left turn onto a six-lane highway.
We have space-age CPUs and GPUs in our pockets that are basically supercomputers! They are faster than most laptops! But somehow Apple Maps scrolls and zooms like butter but Google Maps drops frames all over the floor and makes the whole experience Powerpoint-like.
It feels like Google Maps has spent the last few years packing a kitchen sink's worth of features into itself (much of which seems of dubious utility) but at the same time completely lost the plot on really basic fundamentals like whether or not their renderer can maintain 60Hz on an iPhone 13 Pro, or whether their transit overlays continue to generate illegible lines.
I personally like the small side roads. I happily take alternative routes and saving time is just a bonus. Taking a wild guess, I would bet that majority of the population likes the alternative routing - either because they like the road less traveled or they're impatient and actually care about 3 minutes.
Clearly no one working on that algorithm has experience driving rural roads at dusk and dodging deer!
This is the biggest reason I try to avoid using Google Maps for navigation. It also tends to send me down narrow residential roads where I have to constantly be on the lookout for children, pedestrians, cyclists, or people backing out of their driveways. Or agricultural roads without a divider line where I need to slow down and pull to the shoulder a bit every time I pass oncoming traffic. And in the winter time these roads can be especially dangerous since they aren’t prioritized for snow removal.
Most of the time I’d much rather just take an extra 5 minutes to get where I am going if it results in a safer and more comfortable trip. The built-in GPS in my car does a much better job at this (although not without it’s own quirks) than both Google and Apple maps.
I had used Google Maps + Carplay for years, dismissing the built-in navigation, but during a long road trip recently I realized just how bright the 8inch screen in my truck is, even in dark mode. I switched to the built-in nav and it was significantly darker and I realized I could literally see more of the road with it than with Carplay because of the lack of added ambient light from the screen. After using it for a while I realized it's good enough and in some cases even better.
Google Maps' terrible UX has become a joke now. It mentions irrelevant details (e.g. emphasis on compass directions, which no modern person relies on) and uses esoteric language when plain English works (can't remember well, but things like "stay on right of the fork"). It just felt... badly designed, if not amateurish.
Apple Maps is far from perfect, but the cradle feels warmer.
Otherwise I really do like Apple Maps.
> - ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts
This one irks me the most, so often it will take me a way where I need to get across a busy 4 lane road instead of taking me on a slightly different route where I will end up on that road instead, or at traffic lights where I can actually turn properly. I feel like it waaaayy over-optimizes for time "saved" to the point where it takes you a bone-headed way just to "save" you twenty seconds out of your whole trip, but _only_ if you are incredibly lucky with lights or breaks in traffic.
After reading this thread I am going to try out Apple Maps again and see whether it's any better.
Same happened to me several years ago, I stopped using Google maps. It tries to hyper optimise the journey-- in one case, there was some traffic on the highway so it took me thru the city. The problem was-- even with traffic the highway was still moving at 40mph. In the city, I was at 10mph and a red light every 5 minutes.
And at one point, it tried to save me literally 5 feet by taking me through a truck parking lane-- that is not only dangerous but probabbly illegal as well. I dumped google for Apple Maps, havent looked back since
At least it's much more of a pleasure here in Europe than some other places.
That's odd, that's my biggest complaint with Apple Maps, and I feel Google rarely does it.
My dad when driving on the highway and the road veers in any way that is in any way not a BLATANTLY obvious exit: "What do I do? Which way do I go?"
Me: "It's fine dad, just keep left. That's the way the main highway is heading"
My dad when Google Maps suggests a route that isn't the most direct way possible: "Why is it telling me to go this way? That's not the fastest route."
Me: "Dad, the app knows about traffic conditions. There's probably a good reason why it's suggesting this way"
My dad when he knows that 4 hours a way there is a bridge or a tunnel that has incremental conditions: "We should look up to see if the bridge is busy so that we can decide now whether in 2 hours we will pick a different route"
All these notifications are SUPER important for a certain type of driver - an older generation that has trouble with letting go of trust, and will insist on giving you directions to their house instead of just telling you the address.
And all these notifications can be silenced (If you click on the Microphone in the app while in Navigation mode, there are 3 options - 1/ fully silent, 2/ all notifications, 3/ only important notifications)
Nobody under 50 ever so much as blinked an eye when I used voice recognition on my phone to start navigating to their address or the airport.
Boomers? "Google Maps doesn't know how to get to my house", "It makes you take X exit and that's ALWAYS slower" and so on and on.
They were always wrong. Google and Waze always knew where their house was, and showed a valid route to/from. Waze and Google Maps were always accurate to within a minute or two arrival-time-wise. Yet every time the Boomer in the back seat demanded a route change, they'd add 5-10 minutes to the trip time. I'd note the arrival time estimate, then note it going up with each turn the Boomer in the back seat made me take, and I'd note the final time, and it was always higher.
My dispatcher confirmed that drivers seemed to only complain about back-seat driving from boomers.
It was infuriating because I was not paid by time nor mileage, but trip, and sometimes I'd end up missing a shot at another trip I'd been lined up for.
Boomers were the only ones to insist on "helping" load or unload their luggage from the trunk...or supervising me / offering their opinion on how to best load. Or expressing doubt that I could not lift their luggage. And then express surprise when, shockingly, someone who spends all fucking day loading luggage in and out of the same car, is highly competent at it.
Boomers were the only ones to insist on "helping" the trunk lid auto-closer close. I'd push the button, start walking away, and the clown would stand there and press on the trunk lid (sometimes making the mechanism freak out, which would of course convince them that they were right, the mechanism needed their help.)
My mum used to be just fine with reading maps, but one of the early symptoms of her Alzheimer’s (before any of us recognised it as such) was that maps stopped making any sense to her.
My dad wrote some kind of software for the Plessy (subsequently Marconi) military IFF transponder projects, but after retirement it literally took him years to realise that the Google search results had a scroll bar and it wasn’t just three results.
(Unrelated, but are we millennials really going to bemoan gen-Z the way people bemoaned us when we were their ages?)
Yes absolutely. It is the circle of life.
Lol dude, your dad is not representative of an entire generation.
Not everyone ages at the same rate or in the same way. If only I could be that active at 90. First, have to make it to 90.
Usually took us forever to get to our destination…
* Google is becoming less correct
- ex: "use the right 3 lanes" when only the right 2 lanes work
* Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging
- ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts
* Google is hammering me with unimportant details
- ex: I don't care that I'm on the fastest route
- ex: I don't care that something 4 hours away has a traffic jam
- ex: I don't need to be told to stay on just because an exit ramp has a disappearing lane
* Google tries to send me on wild boondoggles literally all the time. It sends me off highway in an attempt to avoid traffic, along with several other poor lost souls who are aimlessly listening to the same computer as me while we drive through some rural thru street.
So I stopped using google. Apple isn't perfect but it's unsurprising for long road trips and provides reliable instruction that follows major road paths.